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As I anticipate my birthday curry, I’ll post about the goodies I’ve received. Since it’s my seventieth, people have been especially generous; here are the books I’ve gotten so far:

Dictionary of Advanced Russian Usage, 2nd Edition: A Guide to Idiom, Colloquialisms, Slang and More (English-Russian, Russian-English) by Michael Kayser; as I told Lizok (to whom I bragged about it), Kayser is very idiosyncratic, and I wouldn’t let an inexperienced learner/translator near this book, but if you have a good background it’s invaluable — he includes all sorts of stuff nobody else would think of, and many entries make you both think and chuckle.

In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova — the Russian edition came in at #1 in Polka’s list of the 100 most important Russian books of the 21st century, and the translation by Sasha Dugdale (done in collaboration with the author: “I’ve benefited from Maria Stepanova’s highly literary understanding of English and English-language culture, and the generosity and freedom she gave me to recreate her brilliant work in a new poetic language”) is supposed to be excellent. I’m very excited to read it.

Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray — I’ve been wanting to read this for years.

Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford — I’ve long wanted a good biography of my favorite composer.

My brother gave me two collections of sf stories, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu and Exhalation by the great Ted Chiang, as well as the intriguing-looking The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars; he also gave me two movies, the 1950 Losey noir The Prowler and the much-lauded Minari (I look forward to hearing the Korean). From person or persons unknown, I got in the mail a very welcome gift of The Second Marxian Invasion: The Fiction of the Strugatsky Brothers by Stephen W. Potts — many thanks, whoever you are! And I treated myself to the DVD set of the first season of In Treatment, which I’ve heard great things about. Even the hot, steamy weather has let up; the high dropped from the 90s to the 70s. It’s been a good day.

Stuart M McManus writes at Psyche about yet another of those remarkable cosmopolites who have been largely forgotten:

[…] I bet you’ve never heard of the Japanese-born Martinho Hara (原) (c1568-1629). This is a pity because not only did Hara’s life overlap with better-known Renaissance scholars such as Montaigne in France and Giordano Bruno in Italy, but he also shared many of their humanistic interests and standards. Perhaps the most surprising of these was that this Japanese Renaissance humanist was an accomplished Latin public speaker (or ‘orator’ to use the contemporary term). In other words, he was a Japanese echo of the Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE), the Renaissance’s ‘poster boy’ whose speeches were widely imitated by diplomats, preachers and professors from the late 14th century onwards.

How did this happen? Born close to the thriving Luso-Japanese port of Nagasaki in Southern Japan, Hara studied with the Jesuits who had founded colleges across Asia and Latin America. This was facilitated by Iberian (ie, Spanish and Portuguese) mercantile and imperial expansion, which simultaneously ravaged the world’s coastlines and created new opportunities for cultural interactions on a global scale. In the Jesuit college in Nagasaki (as well as in the colleges of Mexico City, Puebla, Guadalajara, Lima, Manila, Goa, Macau, etc), students followed a typical Renaissance curriculum, including classical rhetoric: the rules for structuring and ornamenting speeches that had been key to elite education at Athens and Rome and were later revived in the Renaissance. […]

Hara delivered his Latin oration in 1588 in the chapel of St Paul’s College in Goa during a stop-off in India on his return journey from the Tensho Embassy to Rome. In his speech, which was pronounced in a space that evoked antiquity with its Corinthian columns and gate reminiscent of a Roman triumphal arch, this Japanese Cicero thanked the head of the Jesuit mission in Asia, Alessandro Valignano, praising him as a new Alexander the Great, conquering Asia for Christ. As an epideictic oration (ie, a speech focused on either praise or blame, and commonly used in Roman imperial rituals), this was meant not just to celebrate its subject. Rather, it aimed to exhort its listeners to follow in Hara’s footsteps in spreading Christianity and countering its ‘enemies’ in Japan: Buddhism and Shintoism. […]

After its delivery, Hara’s rousing speech was printed by another Japanese student on a press brought from Europe. This was later taken to Macau and Nagasaki, where it was used to print Latin textbooks for use by aspiring Chinese and Japanese priests. Clearly then, the Latin books, Ciceronian orations and classicising architecture that we associate with the Renaissance were found not just in famous European centres, such as Florence, Venice and Paris. Rather, the Renaissance was a widespread, almost global movement initially carried beyond Europe by Spanish and Portuguese expansion in Asia and the Americas.

There’s much more at the link, e.g. Jesuit sermons in Chinese and Manuel Micheltorena’s 1844 oration to celebrate Mexican Independence; you can see McManus give a 20-minute talk about Hara at Gakushuin Women’s College here. (I assumed Hara must have had a Japanese given name besides the Portuguese Martinho, but if he did, Japanese Wikipedia doesn’t know it.) Thanks, Jack!

I recently ran across the term “cat’s eye” and (since it clearly did not refer to a cat) was puzzled; looking it up, I discovered that “A cat’s eye or road stud is a retroreflective safety device used in road marking and was the first of a range of raised pavement markers.” The Wikipedia article has this history:

The inventor of cat’s eyes was Percy Shaw of Boothtown, Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. When the tram-lines were removed in the nearby suburb of Ambler Thorn, he realised that he had been using the polished steel rails to navigate at night. The name “cat’s eye” comes from Shaw’s inspiration for the device: the eyeshine reflecting from the eyes of a cat. In 1934, he patented his invention (patents Nos. 436,290 and 457,536), and on 15 March 1935, founded Reflecting Roadstuds Limited in Halifax to manufacture the items. The name Catseye is their trademark. […]

The blackouts of World War II (1939–1945) and the shuttered car headlights then in use demonstrated the value of Shaw’s invention and helped popularise their mass use in the UK. After the war, they received firm backing from a Ministry of Transport committee led by James Callaghan and Sir Arthur Young. Eventually, their use spread all over the world.

All over the world… except in the US: “The closest equivalent in the United States is the Stimsonite retroreflective raised pavement marker. Stimsonite markers are made out of plastic, not metal, and were first invented in 1963.” I guess this is one of those transatlantic differences, but one I’d never learned about. Are any of my US readers familiar with the term, and am I correct in thinking it’s well known to those in the UK?

A decade ago I posted about Chinese typewriters; now I’m happy to pass along Thomas S. Mullaney’s Fast Company article about the woman who helped demonstrate and publicize IBM’s 1947 electric Chinese typewriter, invented by Kao Chung-Chin. Yes, you read that right, 1947. Mullaney tells a riveting tale about how he contacted Lew and got her life story (which is in itself an amazing trajectory) and about how the thing worked (you can see a clip of it in action); I’ll just quote this paragraph about the outcome of the team’s initially triumphal visit to China:

In the end, however, it was geopolitics that would kill Kao’s project. “The Communist takeover in China was well underway at the time,” a 1964 retrospective article explained, “and was completed before the typewriter had a chance to achieve significant sales in an understandably nervous Chinese market.” Not only did Mao’s victory in mainland China push IBM’s anxieties to the breaking point, it also threw Kao’s national identity into turmoil. He became a man without a country, being issued a special Diplomatic “Red” Visa by the United States. The IBM Chinese Typewriter never made it to market, leaving the challenge of electrifying—and eventually computerizing—the Chinese language to later inventors in the second half of the twentieth-century (a topic I’ve written about elsewhere, including in a forthcoming book on MIT Press called, unsurprisingly enough, The Chinese Computer).

Thanks, Bathrobe!

I recently heard the word habitat and thought “That sounds like a Latin verb, but that can’t be right, can it?” After all, debit and credit look like Latin verbs too, but it’s just appearance: they’re both French forms of Latin nouns with the ending chopped off, as is normal for French. But I looked up habitat and found that it is indeed what it looks like; OED:

Etymology: < Latin habitat, 3rd person singular present tense of habitāre, literally ‘it inhabits’, in Floras or Faunas, written in Latin, introducing the natural place of growth or occurrence of a species. Hence, taken as the technical term for this.

As you can probably tell from the style of that etymology, it hasn’t been updated since 1898, but other sources tell the same story, e.g. AHD: “Latin, it dwells, third person sing. present of habitāre, to dwell.” Here are the first two OED citations:

[1762 W. Hudson Flora Anglica 70 Common Primrose—Habitat in sylvis sepibus et ericetis ubique.]
1796 W. Withering Arrangem. Brit. Plants (ed. 3) Dict. Terms 62 Habitatio, the natural place of growth of a plant in its wild state. This is now generally expressed by the word Habitat.

I get that they were used to seeing it in such Latin contexts as the 1762 citation, but I would have thought Latinity was ubiquitous enough in the 18th century (among the educated word-coining classes, obviously) that it wouldn’t have occurred to them to treat it as a noun. Why not habitation?

I’ve quoted Gary Saul Morson a lot here; I’m doing it again, I’ll do so in the future, and I make no apologies — he’s one of the few writers on literature and culture who pretty much always gets it right, and this interview from the NYRB newsletter is worth quoting in extenso (the introduction includes this striking bit of backstory: “Born in the Bronx, Morson had initially planned to study French, but due to a blizzard he arrived late for his entrance exam and failed it, leading him to take Russian instead”):

Andrew Katzenstein: In an introduction to Dostoevsky’s The Gambler, you wrote that “Russians are all possibility,” owing to their proclivity “for absorbing others’ culture, for extremes, and for sudden transformations.” This national disposition seems to result from a tension between the country’s indigenous culture and Western influence—a tension that runs throughout Russian history and literature. How has it played out in the work of the writers you’ve discussed in the Review?

Gary Saul Morson: By brute force, Peter the Great utterly transformed Russia almost overnight. Noblemen had to learn Western values, shave their beards, bring women out of seclusion, and copy Western manners, and so they had a strong sense of play-acting and impostorship. Customs that had taken centuries to evolve in Western countries and were natural there seemed arbitrary to Russians. They had a strong sense that things could be otherwise because they had recently been so.

High culture itself seemed like a foreign import. Millennia of Western thinkers and writers were absorbed simultaneously, so that, let us say, Sophocles, Dante, and Descartes entered Russia together and seemed like contemporaries who argued directly with one another. This telescoping of cultural history created a sense of urgency, and of the presentness of the distant past, that is absent in the West.

Because of a strong sense of the utter conventionality of genres, the Russian tradition became one of metaliterature. Tolstoy famously said that War and Peace belongs to no recognized genre, and that makes it quintessentially Russian since “not a single work of Russian literature, from Gogol’s Dead Souls to Dostoevsky’s Dead House” conforms to Western norms of genre. It is hardly surprising that the Russian Formalists developed a theory of literature centering on what they called “baring the device.”

[Read more…]

A couple of Language Log posts interesting enough I thought I’d share them here:

1) Korean Romanization

Victor Mair says “I can’t think of another language in the world where the Romanization situation is more chaotic than it is for Korean. There are seven schemes in common use…” and goes on to explain the merits and demerits of each. As someone who never studied the language and has often been confused by the ways it’s transliterated, I found it helpful.

2) R.I.P. Daniel Kane (1948-2021)

Kane is one of those remarkable people I wish I’d known. From the Sydney Morning Herald obit:

At his primary school in 1950s Melbourne, Danny Kane would ask the kids from Italy, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere how to say things in their language. He became quite fluent in Italian and picked up Latin from the liturgy at church, pursuing it formally in high school along with French. […]

He got a job as a teller in a bank on Lygon Street, Carlton, the heart of Melbourne’s Little Italy where he found himself speaking Italian all day with customers, and occasionally French, and was also on the way to fluency in Spanish.

As he recalled in 2019 in an interview with the Australian National University’s Annie Luman Ren, “someone from the university came in one day and we got chatting in Italian, and he said to me, ‘Why are you working at a bank?’ And I said, ‘Oh, it pays the bills.’ To which he said, ‘Why don’t you go to the university?’ For me, university was where people go to become doctors or lawyers. The person said, ‘Come to my office and we will talk about it.’ He turned out to be the dean of the arts faculty.” […]

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José Vergara (see this post) was kind enough to send me a copy of his article “The Embodied Language of Sasha Sokolov’s A School for Fools” (Slavonic and East European Review 97.3 [July 2019]: 426-450), which is available at JSTOR, and it’s one of the best things I’ve read about Sokolov (see this post for my take on A School for Fools); in particular, it gets the importance of language in his work in a way that scholars who concentrate on psychology or (feh) politics don’t. I’ll quote some relevant passages and recommend the whole thing to anyone with an interest in Sokolov (or, really, modernist literature in general):

A third factor that bears consideration is Sokolov’s attitude toward language in general and Russian in particular. The author has consistently advocated a perspective that places the literary word above all else, as in an interview with David Remnick conducted after his return to Russia in 1989:

Texts are more important than life, for me. Language is more important than life. So if you deal with language, you are creating not only texts, but also something more important than life. It’s been said many times, of course, but it is true that first there was the Word, and God created the Word, the Word is God, and God is more important than life.

His novels, in turn, reflect these beliefs, as Sokolov prioritizes the intricacies of his language over plot, character and setting. […]

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The phrase “old army game” has flickered at the edges of my consciousness for decades; I never bothered to investigate it, contenting myself with the sense that it was some sort of con. Now Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has done the research and told the story:

The old army game is a phrase that has gone through a number of different meanings over the years. It started out as a name for a gambling game—exactly which one varies with the telling—shifted to refer to sucker’s game—like three-card-monte—and then comes to mean any kind of confidence game or deception. Meanwhile, in baseball it developed three distinct and contradictory senses.

The earliest use I have found of army game is as another name for the game commonly called chuck-a-luck. It apparently got that name because of chuck-a-luck’s popularity among soldiers during the 1861–65 U.S. Civil War. The particular use, however, is from a chapter subtitle in William Rideing’s 1879 travelogue, A-Saddle in the Wild West, and the army game is great, not old […] For those unfamiliar with the game, John Philip Quinn’s 1890 book on gambling, Fools of Fortune, gives a description of chuck-a-luck and explains that while the game can be played on the level, a skilled player can easily rig it to take money from the unsuspecting […]

Other early appearances of old army game use it to describe other or unspecified games of chance. […] And given this association with rigged games of chance, it should be no surprise that old army game generalized to refer to any deception or confidence game. There is this article from the 24 May 1910 Jersey Journal that uses old army game to refer to what can only be described as a predecessor to the “Nigerian prince” email scam so familiar to us today. […]

But we also see the old army game used in baseball, and in ways that are difficult to reconcile with both the gambling senses and with each other. At first, the phrase in baseball parlance referred to a style or tactic of defensive play, perhaps one involving some kind of deception, but exactly what is unclear. […] The second baseball sense is that of an aggressive style of play, involving bunts, base stealing, hit-and-run plays, and the like. […] But old army game could also mean exactly the opposite, a strategy that relies on slugging and long balls. […] So, in the case of baseball, the old army game is what we call a Janus phrase, one that has meanings that are diametrically opposed to one another.

See Dave’s post for the (sometimes lengthy) illustrative quotations and for further discussion; I particularly recommend Quinn’s lively description of chuck-a-luck. The OED has no occurrences of “army game,” though they do have an entry for chuck-a-luck (“A gambling game played with dice,” first citation 1836). It’s particularly striking to me that “army game” was used in baseball with such different senses — you’d think it would have gotten settled in one. But I guess it never caught on enough for that.

I’ve enjoyed Sergei Dovlatov’s writing for years and posted on him various times (e.g., here). But I had no clue regarding one feature that Anatoly Vorobei describes. I’ll translate a couple of paragraphs:

Rereading Dovlatov’s Zone, I find myself unable to overlook a particular stylistic trick. Surely many are unaware of this interesting principle. From the ’80s, Dovlatov’s books obey a severe restriction. Different letters must begin the words in each sentence. The rule is strict; deviations exist but are quite uncommon. […]

His style appears in many ways determined by this rule. Sentences wind up quite brief. Sometimes chopped up. Many short, but afterwards you notice one unexpectedly long, thirteen words (I espied fifteen!). You sense how the author operates, finding words but making changes if letters repeat.

It’s a strange restriction, not very easily complied with, unlikely to be perceived.